Later that evening, drinking local wine, I enquired of a man in a bar if this behaviour was part of life, as he knew it here. My new friend, who had good English, told me this man was most likely gone into his head. This was a regular occurrence and happened often he said, as he gestured at me with his hand flat outstretched just below his forehead, to show me how someone lives in their head, as though the brain had permanently dipped down into the skull a little, bobbing in the fluid, just above the eyebrows. ‘We call it introvert,’ he said to me. ‘You know, how do you say it, trauma perhaps, you know, from all the years as a partisan, and all the years the boys were in the woods. Forest Brothers, hiding out or escaping and maybe, in the end, truly lost. Some, well, some never came back, you know? Sometimes people had nothing to come back to, no one, or no place. And even when they did return, most had stayed away, you know, on the inside.’

The next day, at sunrise, I visited Thomas Mann’s summer house on the Curonian Spit. I couldn’t remain long inside the house – it was claustrophobic. I went on and wandered along the pine groves, over the sand dunes and eventually came face to face with a wild pig. We looked at each other and I stayed absolutely still until he eventually tired of snorting at me.

I would have liked to escape there, live near the Mann house, hide out, and live out my life with a wind chime and pottery, drink mead, make mead, drink mead, repeat, but I couldn’t enter the sea there, there was no proper swimming, and I couldn’t live in a place where I couldn’t suddenly enter the water, to cool off, or at least know I could if I needed to, so that the water would hold me for a little while, allow me to float, alone.

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